August 23, 2017 by Robert Franklin, Esq, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

At last! Out of Nebraska there comes both a sensible trial court ruling and a sensible appellate court one. In a nutshell, the family court judge ruled that two parents, Thomas and Angelina Spethman, were imperfect, but loving parents. Each had foibles, each failed at times to keep promises, each lapsed briefly in oversight of the kids, etc. But none of that interfered with their love for and dedication to their five children. So the week-on/week-off parenting schedule the trial court ordered and that Thomas and Angelina adhered to was appropriate and worked well.

In short, both courts kept their eye on the ball. That is, in all child custody cases, what’s most important is what’s best for the kids. What’s best for the kids tends strongly to be equally shared parenting. And we don’t require perfection of either parent in order to enter an order that doesn’t marginalize one in the lives of the children. Every parent who’s ever lived is flawed in some – usually many – ways. That is not a reason to interfere in their relationship with their children.

August 18, 2017 by Robert Franklin, Esq, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The New Jersey Supreme Court has struck a blow for kids, families and common sense (NJ.com, 8/10/17). In the case of Bisbing v. Bisbing, the Court ruled that, when a parent with primary custody wants to relocate with the children, she may only do so if she proves that relocation is in the children’s best interests.

Given the current state of the law on child custody, that should have been nothing but the obvious, but in the Garden State, it wasn’t. Before the Bisbing case, non-custodial parents had the burden of proving that the moveaway wasn’t in the child’s best interests. The high court placed the burden of proof where it should have been all along – on the moving party.

August 17, 2017 by Robert Franklin, Esq, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Larissa MacFarquhar at The New Yorker is to be congratulated for this fine article on the child protective and foster care systems in New York (New Yorker, 8/7/17). The piece is long and covers most, but not all of the bases. What’s most powerful about it is that it takes time to hear from most of the players in the child protective and foster care systems. It shows the situation from many points of view, it brings home the hopelessness of a governmental entity trying to make decisions about children’s care that, often enough, it’s incompetent to make.

Most importantly, MacFarquhar makes sure her readers, along with the parents, lawyers, caseworkers and judges, walk that fine – sometimes almost indistinguishable – line between poverty and child neglect. After all, again as the article makes clear, the great majority of cases seen by child protective caseworkers are about neglect, not abuse. And what is neglect and what is poverty? My guess is that few people tasked with figuring that out in any given case would do so well. Multiply that single case by the number of cases actually handled at a single time by a caseworker and you have a prescription for getting matters wrong.